Hey Strong Bad,
Me and some of my friends are thinking of doing a web
comic together and I was wondering if you had any suggestions
for us. Thanks a lot
Gunkiller
Standing right behind you

{Strong Bad mutters "for not using punctuation" after "Thanks a lot" and pronounces "Gunkiller" as "Gunk-iller".}

STRONG BAD:{typing} Who are you? Gunhaver's evil twin brother? Well I won't be needing your services today; all my gunk is plenty ill already. {clears screen} Web comics are easy, Gunky. They're all about video games, gamernerds, webgeeks, dorknerds, gamewads, nerdgames, webwebs, and elves. So just pick one of those and start tableting! Like the one where the slickly drawn college roommates make nothing but video game inside jokes!

{during the preceding, the scene changes to a shot of a comic with two characters, one of whom loosely resembles Strong Bad with black hair and a yellow T-shirt; the other loosely resembles Strong Sad with short blond hair and holding a hand-held video game}

STRONG BAD-LIKE CHARACTER:{beginning a short way through the previous line, and continuing simultaneously with it} Light bloom, floating point frame buffers, volumetric effects, high dynamic range rendering...

{the scene fades}

STRONG BAD:{voiceover} Oh, I wish I knew what that means.

{Cut back to Strong Bad at the Lappy}

STRONG BAD:{typing} Another approach is to just ask for input from your viewers and rip that off for content. {zoom out a bit, Strong Bad turns around to face the camera} Pfff. What a cop-out.

{New Paper comes down extremely quickly. Cut to The Cheat at Monosodium Dreams.}

STRONG BAD:{voiceover} The Cheat has one of those. He gets people to send him the weird senders' names from spam emails, {The Cheat clicks the menu for "Email" and brings up a list of names with a list of subjects} and then he makes interpretive drawings based on them! {The Cheat double clicks the name "Colliding R. Reallying"} Classics like—

{The scene changes to an undersea image in which two sharks are colliding. Swimming below them is a creature consisting of a glass dome and a propeller. Under this is the text "Colliding R. Reallying" in yellow.}

{The scene changes to an image of a man in athletic clothing standing outside a mostly-raised drawbridge over a moat. The man has a mane and horns, and his left arm is extended down into the moat and back up to knock on the drawbridge, which has eyes, a tongue and teeth. The text "Knowingest J. Drawbridges" appears in white at the top.}

STRONG BAD: —Knowingest J. Drawbridges!

{Cut back to The Cheat, still looking at the Knowingest J. Drawbridges picture on Monosodium Dreams. Strong Bad is now with him.}

STRONG BAD: That stuff is totally messed up, The Cheat. That gunk is ill.

{Cut to an image of a character whose head resembles Strong Bad's mask with a beard. He also has a muscular torso and is holding a buckler and sword. A creature resembling The Cheat with a pointy tail and horns is on his shoulder.}

BORGORROTH OF COOLSWORDORROTH:{appears above him in a speech bubble} Hold! Borgorroth of Coolswordorroth shimmies for no man!

THE CHEAT: Meh!

{Cut to wider view; The Cheat-like creature is now behind Borgorroth of Coolswordorroth, who is holding his sword defensively in front of him. A figure in a black cloak is opposite them and holding his right hand at them}

{Cut to a scene of a wizard with green eyes, a brown tunic, a beard, and three jewels set in his forehead looking at the previous scene in a crystal ball in a castle.}

WIZARD: Once I collect the final secret, the sweepstakes will be mine!

{Scene changes to a picture of a clay Nebulon in a kitchen; he has a speech bubble that says, "Secret Collect. will be right back...", above the speech bubble is a small picture of Secret Collect. On the bottom right of the screen is a bubble with the text "Saturday Mornideo Games".}

ANNOUNCER: Secret Collect will be right back.

{scene changes to show a smiling animated Thy Dungeonman and the text "The Animated Adventures of Thy Dungeonman".}

ANNOUNCER: And stay tuned for The Animated Adventures of Thy Dungeonman!

{Cut to a background of poorly-drawn houses, in front of which stand two characters: the text "Go North" and "Get Dagger", both in green letters and with eyes and legs.}

GET DAGGER: My cousin's coming to visit!

{Pan to the right and zoom out to show a text character Take Dagger next to Get Dagger.}

TAKE DAGGER: Hiya, guys!

{Two more green characters are seen running behind them. Cut to a scene of the text character "Dennis" chasing the text character "Ye Flask".}

DENNIS: You get back heeeeeere!

{Cut back to Strong Bad at the Lappy}

STRONG BAD:{typing} So to answer your question, Gunky, DON'T MAKE A WEB COMIC! Why can't you just make a...comic. Everyone knows that putting 'web' in front of words automatically makes them crappier. Just look what happened to 'pages,' and 'cams,' and 'logs.' And who could forget the fall of the mighty 'isode.' Ohh, so tragic.

"Lens Flare", "Plastic Wrap", "Ocean Ripple", "Find Edges," and "Sharpen More" are all filters that one can use in Adobe Photoshop. "Nudge" is the term used to describe the act of moving an object on the image canvas.

Strong Bad mentioning cracked serial numbers is a reference to how many people illegally obtain Photoshop by downloading a cracked serial number online.

Since New Paper came down in a separate room from Strong Bad in the two previous emails, pizza joint and slumber party, this email would mark the first time Strong Bad does not take the opportunity to insult it.

The summary on the Podstar Runner RSS feed reads, "Strong Bad gives suggestions for making a web comic."

The email preview refers to EGM2, a United States-based video game magazine that was published by Sendai Publishing (later bought by Ziff-Davis) from July 1994 to July 1998. It was then renamed Expert Gamer in August 1998 & continued with that name until October 2001, when it was renamed GameNow. GameNow continued publication until January 2004.

"PhramC7acy", which appears as an email sent by hooray4dolphins, is a subject line from an actual spam that was circulating in heavy volume around the time this email was produced. It advertised discount prescription drugs offered by many southeast Asia-based "pharmacies," and the subject had two random letters inserted where the C and 7 appear here to avoid detection by spam filters.

The unlicensed pixel webcomic refers to a genre known as sprite comics, which use sprite-based graphics from video games are implemented to create the comic, such as in 8-bit Theater.

The Cheat's web comic, based on spam mailers' names, is a reference to Spamusement!.

The Secret Collect Saturday morning cartoon is a reference to various cartoons produced in the 1980s that were based on early video games, such as Pac-Man, and "Saturday Mornideo Games" is a reference to cartoons series based on sets of video games, such as Saturday Supercade and Captain N: The Game Master. Because most early games had no inherent plot or established universe, many of these cartoons introduced new characters and plot lines to keep the material interesting to viewers.

Whereas the Podstar Runner version of this toon had the text of the first New Paper altered in such a way as to deprive it of any relevance to Strong Bad's criticism of comics that use fan-submitted material, the first New Paper's appearance on the DVD returns to the original message of emailing Strong Bad.

MATT: Curly Joe Derita. {pause} I had to do a lot of research on this. I knew what those kinds of words were. I knew what a teraflop was, I think. But I had to look up— I just looked up specs for the PlayStation 3. {Mike laughs} That's what all of those were.

{pause until after Strong Bad says "What a cop-out." and New Paper comes down}

MATT: So this is something, these— several of these are real... uh, spam email senders. {of Colliding R. Reallying} That's one Mike and I were keeping track of for a while. {pause} Those both drawings just came out way more, like, um, uh, explodingdog. Like, closer to explodingdog than I... wanted them to, yeah.

MIKE:{simultaneously} Than you... anticipated.

MATT: I mean, I was, you know, clearly that was being a parody, but it was, uh, closer than I wanted it to. {about the Burn & Dodge comic} And this is a lot of these.

MIKE: Mm-hmm.

MATT: I've seen some—some website was doing a, uh, this kinda thing. They had a lens flare quote on some—like, it was showing a screenshot of some... like, MMORPG-type game.

MIKE: Uh-huh.

MATT: And it had lens flare, and I didn't know—I was like, "Was that a reference to us?" Or was that, like, something that's been around for longer?

{pause}

MATT: This turned into a great little feature.

MIKE: Mm-hmm. What's it called?

MATT: It's called Make-O Your Own Stinko. Something like that.

MIKE:{simultaneously} Make-O Your Own Stinko. Yeah.

'{both laugh}

MATT: MS Paint. I—d—it's amazing to me that—I just assumed that with the release of Vista that Microsoft would've stepped up their on-board...

MIKE: Is it still the same?

MATT: ...pro—Oh yeah. Exactly. I mean, that was made with it. I think it was made on my computer. {Mike laughs} So Mike and I really shoehorned in this Saturday morning video game-themed cartoon into this email. It has nothing to do with web comics.

MIKE: But I'm glad we did.

MATT: Yeah, I thought—it was good.

MIKE: Because that—because that...

MATT: Whoa, whoa...

MIKE: ...8-year-old kid from the Secret Collect comic had some really hairy legs.

MATT:{laughs} "Dudeical!" {pause} The most boring... boring cartoon ever. I like that they're advertising—this is extremely misleading for the Thy Dungeonman cartoon show.

MIKE: Yeah, it shows this guy's...

MATT: Surfer dude with a Viking helmet on. We should've just taken that picture of you with your shirt off, like we did for Thy Dungeonman 3.